Solar
I am forever playing catch-up with prolific writers like Ian McEwan, who has published 17 novels (and I have managed to read just 6: Black Dogs, Enduring Love, Amsterdam, Atonement, Solar, Machines like Me ). Solar , I found on the street library, and I am reluctant to put it back. The book deals, in a comic sort of way, with the climate crisis through the story of a Nobel prize-winner, a physicist, who appears to be more interested in his peccadilloes than his protons. McEwan opens his book with a line that only an established male writer could get away with: ‘He belonged to that class of men – vaguely unprepossessing, often bald, fat, clever – who are unaccountably attractive to certain beautiful women’ (3). “Unaccountable” is the key to the sentence: Michael Beard has a string of ex-wives, one on the way out and a lover to compensate; but he has money and a degree of fame, and that (perhaps) accounts for the unaccountable. In the manner of English novels written by men about fl